One often wishes to use another liquid or flavoring with their beverage, where it is undesirable or inconvenient to premix the liquid or flavoring with the beverage. As examples, there is lemon or milk with tea, citrus fruit flavored liquids with beer, juices with alcoholic beverages, alcohol with soft drinks, sugar with coffee or tea, salt with tequila, etc. In many cases, particularly with prepackaged beverages, the purchaser of the prepackaged beverage is not located at a place where the other liquid or flavoring is conveniently accessible.
Many popular beverages are served in a bottle. For example, when certain brands of beer, especially Mexican beers, are served it is common to add a flavoring, such as a wedge or slice of lime. For instance, when a patron at a bar orders a Corona Extra® (www.corona.com), a Pacifico® beer (www.gmodel.com.mx/eng/marcas/pacifico.html) or a Dos Equis® beer (www.dosxx.com), the beer is frequently served with a natural lime slice inserted into the neck of the opened bottle. This scenario is adequate when one has easy access to natural limes. However, as is often the case, one buys a bottle of beer in a store or gets one from their refrigerator and does not have a natural lime handy. For such situations it would be convenient to have the lime or an equivalent packaged with the bottle. Since natural limes do not store indefinitely, an alternative is to package an artificial lime containing lime-flavored liquid, optionally from concentrate and optionally with preservatives, with the bottle of beer. Another popular American beer, Widmer Hefeweizen® (www.widmer.com), is often consumed with lemon. In this case, it would be convenient to have an artificial lemon containing lemon-flavored liquid packaged with the beer.
Relevant Literature
Luzenberg, Jr., U.S. Pat. No. 6,024,012, describes a porous plastic dispensing article. Luzenberg, U.S. Pat. No. 6,541,055, describes a porous plastic dispensing article. Gibler, U.S. Pat. No. 5,984,141, describes a beverage storage and mixing device. Anderson, U.S. Pat. No. 6,886,686, describes a dispensing capsule for a liquid container. Anderson, U.S. Pat. No. 6,644,471, describes a dispensing capsule for a liquid container. DiPalma, et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,246,142, describes a device for storing two products separately and subsequently mixing them.